These days with the Chinese, Caucasians and Indians manufacturing the widest range of bleach creams, the urgency of lamenting the plight of the African race cries out for even greater attention….
by Rasta Keith
Let’s face it, no one should be told by any one else who they should or should not marry. Expressed differently, every person should feel free to fall in love with whomever they find the requisite chemical attraction and proceed to formalize their relationship in whatever manner they might wish.
Even so, anyone concerned about the impoverishment of the Black race could hardly afford to ignore the obvious trend whereby a lamentable number of Black people of means continue to demonstrate a strange dislike for their own kind once they have ascended sufficiently high on the socio-economic ladder by choosing members of other races as their spouses.
It might be contended that for every Black man or Black woman who marries a woman or man of another race, or who fathers or mothers a child thereby, there is a corresponding number of members of such other races who must necessarily be factored into the equation.
However, anyone who takes the time to penetrate the situation must come to the realization that there is far more in the mortar than just the pestle.
It seems invariably to be the case that in almost every situation involving inter-racial relationships, the Black party more often than not brings more to the table than his or her white counterpart in terms of attractiveness, wealth or other forms of human endowments or assets.
An obvious case in point is that of Serena Williams who recently announced that she is bearing a child. It’s always good news when a couple announces their expectancy of a child; and so one could only wish the lawn tennis star and her fiancé, Alexi Ohanian, the best of luck.
Still, it must be a cause for concern when Serena’s choice of a mate squarely fits into the pattern of almost every case of inter-racial relationships involving so-called black celebrities. With a net worth of approximately (U.S.) $150 million compared to her fiance’s worth of barely (U.S.) $4.5 million, one could hardly help wondering what might be the primary motivating factors for either of the parties’ decisions in such kinds of mixed unions.
Since time and space would not permit of an exhaustive account of Black folks who have engaged in such kinds of self-deprecation, a cursory list would have to suffice. Last year Tyra Banks, with a net worth of some (U.S.) $90 million, mothered a child for her Caucasian fiancé, Erik Asla, who is worth a mere (U.S.) $3 million. If that is not an example of downward socio-economic mobility in Tyra’s case, then exactly what that term means clearly yearns for attention.
With a net worth of approximately (U.S.) $150 million, Janet Jackson’s marriage to billionaire Wissam Al Mana might make it seem that the pop singer’s case completely undermines the argument in this article. But even such an apparently different scenario becomes a bit murky when one considers the fact that neither of her two former husbands were representative of the same ethnic background as hers; and neither of them were any where near her socio-economic level.
Then there is the case of Janet’s baby brother, Michael. If the King of Pop is not a classic embodiment of the saying “do as I say but not as I do” then nothing else would qualify for that status. Everyone thought that there could never have been a more appropriate anthem for race relations than the lyrics of Michael’s song BLACK OR WHITE. However, as Michael had clearly shown, his song was merely a case of “mouth open and word jump out.”
Although the song enjoins humankind to ignore the superficialities of skin color in their relationship with others, Michael had demonstrated over and over again that such wisdom was not to be applied to him. Granted that Michael’s gradual morphing from a black man to white man was in fact due to vitiligo, unless the singer had been cock-eyed or had otherwise suffered from an extreme form of jaundice, the question of whether his wife, Lisa Marie Presley, and the mother of his children, Debbie Rowe, were black or white did seem to have mattered a whole lot to him for both women were as white as white could ever be.
Examples of the apparent feeling of racial inadequacy among Black People seem to abound just about everywhere. Before her marriage with her current Caucasian husband, Arne Naes, Diana Ross of the world-renowned Supremes who has a net worth of some (U.S.) $250 million had been married to her Caucasian manager, Robert Silberstein. And neither of those men had much to offer in exchange.
Tina Turner might have lost faith in humankind as a consequence of the alleged abuse that she suffered under her African-American husband, Ike. But no sooner had Tina been granted her divorce from Ike that she sought comfort with her estimated (U.S.) $200 million in the white arms of her Swiss beau, Erwin Bach, who was by no conceivable measure compatible with her in terms of age or means.
And Erwin knew right from the start that he had nothing to lose and everything to gain from marrying a wealthy black cougar who was seventeen years his senior. Thus, as Professor Michael Levin, an avowed white supremacist of City University of New York, and his ilk are wont to postulate, Black People seem to be far less intelligent than whites.
But women are not the only ones among the Black race who are doling out their birthright to anyone else but their own kind. Michael Jordan walked out of his 17-year marriage to his African-American wife, Juanita Venoy, to marry a Caucasian woman, Yvette Prieto, and to thereby make her the nearest of kin to his almost (U.S.) $2 billion lagesse.
One might have hoped that Black people of extraordinary means might have taken a page or two from the story of Tiger woods who had been taken to the cleaners by his former Swedish wife, Elin Nordegren, for an estimated (U.S.) $100 million. (Just imagine the effect of a tiny portion of that loot seeping through the black community.) But Tiger did not learn anything from Kobe Bryant and others who had previously sojourned along that path. And some might posit that Bill Cosby is definitely too old to learn anything since some 99% of the women now lining up to deprive him of his estimated (U.S.) $400 million nest egg are Caucasians.
Just in case no one else has been paying attention, it was recently announced that Prince Harry of the House of Windsor had become betrothed to a mixed-race American “Commoner” named Megan Markle. The jury is still out on this one but as the daughter of a Caucasian male and an African-American female, Megan stands to make history should her relationship with the British Royal mature into marriage. And then she could expect to benefit from the Windsor’s trove estimated to be in the billions of pounds sterling. But as Jimmy Cliff says: “Time Alone Will Tell”.
Needless to say, there isn’t a Caucasian, or a Chinese, or an Indian of any means who has married or would marry a black person of a lower socio-economic status; celebrity or not. And anyone who could provide any evidence to the contrary should surely be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
One wonders why Black People seem to display such a gross unease with who they are. And the answer seems to come from no one else but Oprah Winfrey. In her autobiography, Oprah laments the discomfort she used to feel being a black young lady and she describes how she would go to bed night after night with her nose pinned with as many clothes pins as that body part could have accommodated in the hope that it would one day become as straight as her white friends’ noses.
Probably Oprah has since come around to reconciling those feelings of inadequacy. But the memories of her friends nicknaming her the “Oreo Cookie” must dawn on her from time to time in a manner reminiscent of Franz Fanon’s BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS. And these days with the Chinese, Caucasians and Indians manufacturing the widest range of bleach creams, the urgency of lamenting the plight of the African race cries out for even greater attention.
